I've been doing a lot of research into lightweight, low resource applications. Gtk 1.2 applications may no longer be in development. However, there are a lot of useful SDL, ncurses/pdcurses and FLTK based applications that are actively developed and are lightweight and would run well on older systems.

JWM is great as a lightweight X window manager, but if you want something that might be lighter on low resource machines, framebuffer applications could be an option. The Nanolinux distribution and Rogue Class Linux distribution both run completely in framebuffer. Another option besides X might be Wayland.

There are two webkit browsers that are FLTK based, netrider and fifth. Webkit based browsers can handle most modern web pages, but they can take up a lot of resources. The FLTK based webkit browsers are probably the lightest in that class. There are lighter options, but most can't fully render a modern web page. One interesting lighter option is Dplus which is a fork of Dillo.

If anyone's interested in further development of DSL, I'd be willing to volunteer to help out with applications. I'm working on build scripts and patches for several lightweight applications to make sure they continue to build and run smoothly as various libraries are updated.

Anyone have recommendations for web sites that work on slow Internet connections/connections with low bandwidth? Am interested in news or web portal sites, but would appreciate any recommendations in general.

Sometimes I try mobile versions of sites that may be optimized for bandwidth and most forums usually work pretty well. Lynx friendly sites typically load well too. I optimize my own web site for low bandwidth computers. I've also seen some users with older computers recommend programs like surfraw. Would be interested in other tips for machines with slow Internet access and any pointers to sites that load well on low bandwidth systems. Thanks.

Another link, Amigo has a bunch of gtk 1.2 apps ..... http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions/amigolinux/download/Applications/ .

There's mention in an old Cinepaint thread ( http://osdir.com/ml/video.cinepaint.devel/2004-04/msg00009.html ) about FL-GTK, a compatibility layer for GTK 1 applications to build using FLTK. FLTK's been through some changes, so a library like this would probably need an update. However, FLTK 1.3 now has some internationalization (Unicode and UTF-8) support which is a plus. I'm currently working with a patched version of FLTK 1.3 that offers themes by setting the FLTK_SCHEME environment variable. So, there is some theme changing capability in version 1.3 too. It would be really nice if we could port some useful GTK 1.2 applications over to FLTK 1.3. There are also quite a few applications that already work with FLTK including a desktop (Equinox Desktop Environment). Other applications available for FLTK include graphics editors and viewers, a beta version of Cinepaint Glasgow, flwriter (word processor), two lightweight browsers (dillo and dplus), a xine front end (multimedia player), daily journal program, todo and disk usage utilities, minimal file manager, alsamixergui, games and a nice front end to synclient for touchpad users.

If anyone would be interested in something like this, I'd be very willing to help attempt to port some other applications over to FLTK 1.3.

As I became aware of problem of software bloat, I made a conclusion: there's no such thing as a slow computer. There's only such thing as poorly optimized software

Enjoyed reading your post. I have more modern computers, but I also have an old Sony laptop with 64 MB RAM. The machine works perfectly well (probably better than some newer machines), so I don't want to get rid of it. I started trying to track down lightweight applications that would work well with it. I also built several applications myself from scratch. The more I look at the code of some of the slower running applications, the more I prefer small, lightweight applications that do one thing well. They're so much easier to build, modify and run. Lately, I've been looking for applications that can be built with more lightweight GUI toolkits like SDL, curses, FLTK and possibly Fox Toolkit instead of more heavyweight GUI libraries like GTK+ and WxWidgets (which uses GTK+ on Linux).

Very nice to hear when others are also interested in lightweight, well-designed software. Most Linux users I've talked to don't seem to care about the issue. Hope to share application ideas and tips with other users.

Am very interested in lightweight applications. Personally, I'm using dplus ( http://sourceforge.net/projects/dplus-browser/ ) instead of dillo. I have applications I need to run on Linux, FreeBSD and Windows and dplus works better cross-platform than dillo. Would be curious to hear what you're using in place of flminicalc. I have flcalc building successfully. There's also a calculator with Fox Toolkit and there's a lua script to run a calculator within SciTE (my current favorite programming editor). I've been experimenting with writing a theme changer for jwm. Several of the lightweight applications I like are listed at http://www.distasis.com/cpp/osrclist.htm I'm currently working on finding lightweight applications, writing scripts to automate the build processes for them and modifying the code to fit my needs as necessary. Would love to share ideas and code.